Too late to be the first.

Ari tells me I’m the last person to notice this, but what the heck: it’s totally obvious that Disney’s Robin Hood is a fable for the modern American right wing, isn’t it? I mean, the Merry Men, these guys who are traditionally English yeomen, are instead depicted and voiced as country music-lovin’, church-goin’ good ol’ boys who just want them some tax rebates. No, really, Andy Devine’s Friar Tuck actually says “tax rebates.”

Want to push this reading untenably further? Notice that Robin Hood and Little John shrug off the idea of running up enormous debt while cutting back taxes. Notice Little John stoutly defends what’s clearly, within the narrative, a foolhardy military adventure as a “great crusade.”

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The fealty to such a piss-poor king as Richard the Lionheart has always bugged me about this story. Everyone is mad at John for collecting taxes, not mentioning that the whole reason for the taxes is to pay Richard’s ransom after he got himself overextended in foreign wars. But everybody hates John and Richard is the hero. Its bullshit.

I’ve always felt that as much as I and Patrick Leahy love Batman, the structure of Batman’s universe shines a positive light on conservative values. Here we have a multi-billionaire who, by his own volition, uses his money and power for good. Bruce Wayne takes a lot of flak now and then, but he’s just so good-hearted that he can’t help but save people who are too corrupt, stupid, or lazy to save themselves. It’s well within the realm of trickle-down economics and even flirts with Atlas Shrugged territory.

Most sword-and-sorcery fantasy literature is depressingly conservative, too. A concrete “good” battles a concrete “evil,” each of which is easily identifiable and essentially incapable of acting in any other way, and “good” always wins through some feeble essentialist mechanism.

It’s also noteworthy that entire segments of the film were lifted straight out of the Jungle Book.

Jason – Yes! This is why I find it very hard to read traditional high fantasy anymore. Especially because good and evil are thrown into a world with kings, feudal lords, and peasants. This throws off my enjoyment, because I come from peasant stock, so I feel instinctively that there iis no such thing as a “rightful King,” and that most knights are thuggish kidnappers and extortionists.

Personally, I think the high fantasy motif needs to be moved into the Renaissance. You get a progressive vs. traditionalist outlook, city-states, republics, and merchant leagues in addition to principalities and empires, lots more room for political intrigue, you can have swashbucklers rather than knights – there’s so much more to do.

Regarding the politics of High Fantasy: has everyone seen the Lord of the Rings movie commentary by Howard Zinn and Noam Chomsky at McSweeney’s from a few years ago? It’s hilarious. You’ll never look at those poor exploited orcs the same way.

My understanding is that the whole Sir Robin thing is a 16th century and later innovation. In the early versions of the legend, he was, as eric says, a yeoman, and not banditing under King John, but probably later. I don’t think any discussion of Robin’s social class made it into the Disney version, though, so it’s neither here nor there.

Anyway, I’m still wondering why Good Ole Southern Boys was the characterization that Disney went with at this time. Yes, sure, probably something to do with Nixon, but was there something to put white lightning and evading the revenuers back on the national radar at this moment. From wikipediaing around, NASCAR was expanding, but that’s a bit of a stretch. What would that other Eric, Hobsbawm, say?

Fair enough. The story definitely evolved over time and originally started as more of a folk tale. However, the Robin-as-knight version is common enough today that the Disney writers were probably familiar with it, even if it doesn’t come up in the film.

Stevenattewell,

Let’s not pretend that the Renaissance is some bastion of progressivism and proto-democratic ideals, either. High Fantasy’s tendency to be both Medieval-themed and morally simplistic says basically nothing about the Middle Ages themselves, only our (typically nostalgic) perception of them. One could certainly write a High Fantasy novel in a Medieval setting that takes in the complexities of the period while fashioning a more complex moral universe. That this hasn’t happened (or, if it has, it has happened very infrequently) says more about the constraints of the genre than anything about the Middle Ages. It’s notable that the one High Fantasy writer everyone is familiar with, Tolkien, was an expert in the complexity of the Middle Ages. Most High Fantasy writers (and I realize this is a cliche, but still) are well-versed in a Dungeons and Dragons variety of the period. Hence: nostalgia, moral simplicitly, a thoroughly non-historical understanding of what makes the Middle Ages interesting, etc.

True enough, but I loved that movie. The appropriate too-close reading of The Incredibles would examine the way that movie simultaneously subverted and paid homage to comic book conventions – and thus would more resemble eric’s delightful Star Trek reading (which I somehow missed until I followed the link here) rather this politics-oriented too-close reading.

Let us not forget that this movie is also a touchstone of Furry Fandom. I think that means that Conservatism = Disney’s Robin Hood = Yiffing.

Also, it’s OT, but for some decidedly nonnostalgic high fantasy, I recommend the A Song of Ice and Fire series (starting with the book A Game of Thrones) by George R. R. Martin. It’s the best and most down-to-earth fantasy I’ve ever read. I think it’s “The Wire” of fantasy.

In that case, shouldn’t the legend of his social origins gone in the other direction, away from aristocracy?: “Lived in a yeoman’s hut? That would have been luxury! All Robin Hood had was a bale of hay he held over his head at night.”

Fair enough, but given that we’re talking about “historical” periods as seen in fantasy literature, I think anything that gets us away from the Good Knight/Noble Knight/Humble Peasant schtick is a good thing.

Stevenattewell – I’ll second that recommendation of GRR Martin. He somehow manages to take full advantage of all the usual medieval fantasy tropes while also keeping one foot planted firmly in the mud. The peasants still aren’t the main characters, but at least it acknowledges that it’s their world and that the presence of knights & kings is most often either irrelevant or dangerous.

How can the Baroque Cycle be ‘fantasy’? It has neither magic, nor non-human sentience, nor much else of that genre [except a hinted immortal Enoch the Red who pops up mysteriously]. While it might have the odd ‘fantastical’ element, they are no more than one might find in any picaresque tale. Has ‘fantasy’ expanded to absorb alternative history while I was not looking? Or have I missed whole reams of subplots buried in the voluminousness of the thing?

Also, more on topic: the 3rd & 4th books of Martin’s series include a pretty disturbing twist on the Robin Hood legend. The Merry Men analogues are still kind of colorful (including a very cool friar) but they’re mentally ravaged war survivors who end up behaving more or less as partisan guerrillas really do; what the poor get is mostly IOUs from the outlaws, and hideous death from the outlaw-hunters.

Yeah, I understand what you mean. I think it basically comes down to writers who love their “worlds” and get lost in the (ahem) fantasy of it all, and writers who tell stories about people. Fantasy as a genre tends a little too much toward the former, although exceptions surely exist (I will now definitely check out Martin). Of course, it’s not just a fantasy problem; science fiction has plenty of writers who love their worlds and gadgets more than their people, too, but SF seems, on the whole (purely my own gut feeling here), a more diverse and experimental genre, and thus tends to be more creative. Why this is, I can’t say, except to speculate (again) that certain people are really drawn to a nostalgic version of the past and may not be the sorts of people who take creative risks.

What I think you folks are missing here is that there’s actually a valid type of story that’s about individual glory. It fills a human need, even if it’s a rather simple one. We need our Rolands. I think it’s more likely to be a failing rather than a strength of the left that it disdains the heroic mode. (The West Wing, actually, does an interesting thing: emphatically liberal politics, but very much in the heroic mode. You could practically give Jed Bartlett a longsword.)

Also. Robin Hood was a Renaissance invention, and a creation of the middle class. The “Sir Robin of Loxley” stuff was tacked on later to give him a more respectable pedigree.

Hard to conceive of Robin Hood as conservative, sorry. The narrative is explicitly poor vs. rich, and Richard is practically an afterthought. The accents? Well, Disney has evidently decided that every movie requires ethnic comic relief, and they’d already covered blacks, Italians, and beatniks. (Arabs, Jamaicans, Chinese, and Frenchies still to come.)